The structure of global inter-firm networks

Takayuki Mizuno, Takaaki Ohnishi and Tsutomu Watanabe

No 37, HIT-REFINED Working Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: We investigate the structure of global inter-firm relationships using a unique dataset containing information on customers, suppliers, licensors, licensees and strategic alliances for each of 412,814 major incorporated non-financial firms in the world. We focus on three different networks: customer-supplier network, licensee-licensor network, and strategic alliance network. In/out-degree distribution of these networks follows a Pareto distribution with an exponent of 1.5. The shortest path length on the networks for any pair of firms is around six links. The networks have a scale-free property.

Keywords: Inter-firm relationship; Scale-free network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 6 pages
Date: 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com, nep-cse, nep-net and nep-tid
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hit:remfce:37

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